


allegories and caves

by deniigiq



Series: Inimitable Verse [19]
Category: Black Panther (2018), Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), Spider-Man - All Media Types
Genre: Childhood Friends, Friendship, Gen, Laboratories, Office, POV Outsider, being assholes, but you know in a loving kind of way, the princess needs attention, the spider needs to stop breaking his damn phone
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-02
Updated: 2020-03-02
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:07:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22986067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deniigiq/pseuds/deniigiq
Summary: There were two doors after the news portal that were more or less tidy. One had a picture of the Cookie Monster tacked to its cork board while the other had Elmo reaching out his way, which Shuri thought was very cute.And then there was the last door.There was a cardboard box outside of it that was lined impeccably with energy drink cans.This was her door.This was her man.She tried the handle. It was open.(Peter fails to answer his phone. Shuri decides to rectify that and pays him a visit at work.)
Relationships: Peter Parker & Shuri
Series: Inimitable Verse [19]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1117746
Comments: 48
Kudos: 767





	allegories and caves

**Author's Note:**

> I'm avoiding writing **the lowing** rn so have this little gem instead
> 
> References to invasions of privacy, Shuri being Right, and the emotional state of the American school system. Oh, and raw lobster roe. Please do what you need to to look after yourselves!

Her mother told Shuri time and time again that if she made friends with a stupid, pretty boy in her youth, she would come only to hate him in the years that followed, but Shuri had been bad at taking advice back then.

When Stark first introduced the two of them, this boy had informed her, Princess of Wakanda, that he was reclassifying liquids into the categories of ‘trustworthy’ and ‘untrustworthy’ based on their opacity and that alone. Then, when Shuri began the tedious, but necessary process of grinding his self esteem down into something manageable, he’d caught on within two days and had laid all the way down on the floor for her.

“Don’t worry,” he’d told her brightly. “I’ve got another friend who does the same thing. I know what I’m about here.”

And he’d starfished out and that had been that.

He let Shuri walk all over him and he hummed a little like he liked it, but then mere days later, he was sprinting ahead of her, holding her hand and taking her diving and soaring off and over towers so high that she went a little breathless.

Her brother nearly throttled Stark in front of his entire company board for that, but Shuri, man.

Shuri had gone home and told her mother that this one was different.

She’d maybe had a bit of a crush on Peter Parker. A bitty thing. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. She was sure that he’d had one for her, too.

But then they’d turned eighteen, and Peter Parker fell away from her like a stone that slipped over the side of a waterfall: nigh silently into the mist below.

She texted him and got nothing. She called him and got nothing. She called the girl who she’d always felt a little warm around, the girl who Parker had smiled at just as he’d smiled at her.

Michelle said that she didn’t know what was happening, Parker had stopped answering her calls, too.

It was a year before he got back to Shuri and by then, her mother’s words had tumbled into correctness and all she felt towards that boy was hate.

She told him to forget about all his sky-sailing and to take his inward thinking away from her. She had galaxies in her brain where all he had was shadows on a cave wall.

He’d done what she told him to.

He said he was sorry.

He said he didn’t have an excuse.

And then he had vanished again, this time like feathers blown off the roof of a home, up into the summer stars.

Two years later, at twenty, she’d found out that Parker had been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder those few years ago and he’d had one long breakdown of a year that year of eighteen when they were all out of sorts.

He smiled when she found him and shook the life out of him and demanded to know why he hadn’t just _told her_.

“That’s the anxiety, babes,” he’d said.

And after a moment of processing and trying to figure out whether or not to slap him for the petname, she’d laughed.

Friends again. Pretty boy with his fragile heart and all those skies in between them.

That was then.

But this was now.

And that pretty boy idiot wasn’t answering his phone _again_.

“Blessed, beloved, _darling_ baby sister,” T’Challa said in the most annoying tone in every known universe. “Sometimes, things don’t work out. Sometimes—”

“Yeah, yeah. Stuff it,” she told him. “I’m going with you to New York.”

He thought not.

Then he thought so.

Mom was a miracle worker like that.

T’Challa was exhausting because he continued, after all these years, after all these explanations, to labor under the impression that Shuri wanted something from Peter Parker that Parker was not willing to give her.

A crush.

T’Challa thought that she was still crushing.

She told him to go look in the mirror, then to go have a word with Nakia when he was finished.

T’Challa told her, firstly, that she was rude beyond words, and secondly that she was to stay where he could see her at Stark Industries. He claimed that there would be time after his meeting with the Avengers to go locate Peter Parker and have a word with him about communication.

She petitioned him to tell Stark to bring his favorite little Avenger pet up from his labs for a chat while the old men did their business, but T’Challa told her that Peter Parker’s Avenger status was auxiliary. He did not stand up with the rest of them unless specifically asked to. He had his own team and claimed not to be overly interested in consistent involvement with theirs.

That was stupid, in her very right opinion.

T’Challa, occasionally a supportive brother, said that he agreed with her, but free will was a thing that existed and people had the right to be as stupid and unnecessarily complicated as they so desired. So go sit over there and don’t fight anyone for an hour, sister.

Pft.

As if he could tell her where to sit.

She had free will, dear brother, and so she could be as unnecessarily stubborn and complicated as she so desired.

He threw his hands up and told her to sit, stand, whatever, wherever she pleased, but not to go down to Stark’s labs until the meeting was done and Stark could pull Parker away from his herd.

She agreed.

He squinted.

He claimed he didn’t like when she did that.

She asked him what the hell he wanted from her then, and eventually, he sighed and shook his head and left her to go chat with the elderly like himself.

Shuri waited until he’d turned the corner; she gave him three minutes to remember if he’d forgotten to tell her something, and then she set herself upon the elevators.

Parker, she knew from the records she procured from the perfumed woman at the front desk in the building’s atrium, worked between several labs. He covered labs 35 to 40. That was far too many, in Shuri’s mind. How was anyone supposed to do any intensive work while overseeing six different labs? But whatever, Stark’s business practices were his own. If he wanted to dissolve morale and efficiency, he was more than welcome to.

She extracted the floor numbers of these labs from the security guard standing watch over the elevators.

Then she went up, up, up to the designated floor.

She stepped out into a hallway with linoleum floors and white walls with cool gray trim. There was a cork board outside a wide office door with many notices punched into it and a clear plastic box at the bottom with little compartments; some of these were filled with colorful brochures about lab safety and upcoming community events. One was filled entirely with confetti. One had an orange whistle in it with blue tape over its window that read ‘for emergencies ONLY – LM Stanton’.

She considered blowing the whistle.

She decided not to blow the whistle.

Instead, she sauntered past this cork board and the busy office beside it and made her way down the hallway. On one side of it was a series of large, swinging double doors with glass windows in them. Lab rooms. People in white coats with red bars on them futzed around at the tables inside. There were three sets of those doors before the hallway turned down into another with no doors on that side at all. The wall turned into a huge glass window and the empty wall on the other side turned into a neat row of offices. All of these had corkboards and boxes and envelopes outside of them. Through the window, Shuri could see that the corner of this new hallway led to another three labs. It was neat. Symmetrical. Kind of strange to have windows that faced into the center of the building, actually, but sure. Why not?

She turned her attention to the offices and leisurely passed by each. They seemed quiet enough. One had a large blue piece of paper on it that said ‘CALMING SPACE’ in letters which were not calming. They looked instead like they’d been written by someone holding three sharpies in the same hand at the same time.

The one next to this had nothing on it but a small yellow piece of paper that said when the weekly staff meetings for Teams 35.2-40.2 were. The door past this one was plastered with pages ripped out of various science news magazines and journals.

There were two doors after the news portal that were more or less tidy. One had a picture of the Cookie Monster tacked to its cork board while the other had Elmo reaching out his way, which Shuri thought was very cute.

And then there was the last door.

There was a cardboard box outside of it that was lined impeccably with energy drink cans.

This was her door.

This was her man.

She tried the handle. It was open.

Oh, Parker.

He wasn’t inside, of course not. But all his fucking plants were. On every available space, dear god. This man needed to be stopped. It was a jungle in there. Piled between all the plants on the window sill were collections of smooth polished stones and in the corner closest to the desk was a little shrine. Nothing fancy, just a picture of a neat, academic-looking man set on top of a small copper bowl.

This was Parker’s uncle.

And this was the last neat area in the room. The rest of it was covered in a Parker-typical blanket of post-it notes that embodied his anxiety better than anything else on the planet.

There were multiple open cans of energy drinks on his desk. They all had their own coasters.

There was a fire extinguisher parked right in the center of the desk and a smear of soot in the shape of five fingers behind it.

A small collection of thoroughly yellowed and burnt receipts and order forms had been piled right in front of the computer monitor.

All this told Shuri what she needed to know, which was that Parker would be on his way back in no time. She resolved to have a sit in his chair while she waited.

A knock sounded outside of the door about fifteen minutes into Shuri’s thorough exploration of artistic renditions of anxiety on her phone.

She looked up.

“Hey, Peter?” A soft voice said outside. “Lovett’s hiding a bucket under the sink in 36 again. Himani says it smells like lobster eggs. But it’s black. Are lobster eggs black? She’s ready to fight Leo about this.”

Nice.

Get ‘im, girl.

“Peter?” this soft voice asked again through the door. “They’re starting to volume-up, if you know what I mean. Do you think you could—”

The door creaked open and a woman wearing a lavender hijab went silent and wide-eyed upon seeing Shuri’s propped up legs.

“Lab Manager,” Shuri greeted.

This woman slowly shut the door. It clicked softly.

The pitter-patter of feet sounded out, getting quieter as they got farther from the door.

Shuri waited.

A blood-curdling scream echoed down the hallway.

Now, that was just what she liked to hear.

A rush of footsteps made their way over to the door rapidly and Shuri swiveled back and forth in Parker’s desk chair, fighting the urge to smile. It hurt her face.

“Saanvi. Honey, I need you to calm down,” a new voice said outside the door. “Only I can be this dramatic in this work environment.”

“The-the-there’s—THERE’S—”

“Woah, woah. Girl. It’s okay, it’s gonna be okay,” a man’s voice said soothingly.

Hm. He sounded handsome, whoever he was. A+ genetics for you, sir.

“It’s NOT,” adorable Ms. Saanvi shrieked.

“Yo, I told you fuckers not to—oh. You’re not my staff,” a new voice said.

“BO,” Ms. Saanvi squeaked.

“What’s going on?” Bo asked.

“She’s freaking out,” the first woman’s voice said. “And like, we _get it_ , girl. You don’t like when mom and dad are fighting. Look, though. Me and This Colossal Wrong Person are just fine, aren’t we, Colossal Wrong Person?”

There was a silence.

“What part of that was supposed to make me fine?” the man with the deep voice asked.

“None of it,” the woman snapped.

“Saanvi, babe. You need to breath,” yet another of Parker’s coworkers said. “Go on, just tell us what—oh, hey Parker. Just in time.”

Just in time indeed.

“What’s going on?”

He didn’t sound busy at all. Wow. Rude.

Just for that Shuri was locking the door.

She pushed the chair back and stood up as quietly as possible.

“Saanvi?” Parker’s voice said. “What’s wrong? Are you--? Woah, hey, hey. No crying. Crying bad. Here, here. Give us a hug. Aw, you can do better than—HNG. Okay. May-maybe not.”

“What’s she sayin’, Parker?” The Bo-person outside asked. “I haven’t been able to hear shit since Thursday’s bang.”

There was a soft squeaky noise that got slightly louder as Shuri got closer to the door. She stood in front of it, waiting.

Just waiting.

There was always a moment where action was to be swiftly and neatly taken with these types of things. One movement could seal a fate.

“A what?” the first woman’s voice suddenly said.

“A _princess_ ,” Ms. Saanvi finally moaned.

There was a silence.

Then a flick of a lock.

Parker’s office door shuddered violently.

“SHURI, YOU FUCKING WEASEL.”

Wow, listen to that boom.

Parker had really grown up, hadn’t he?

“What the FUCK, PARKER?”

“Peter, what?”

“SHURI, OPEN THIS DOOR.”

It rattled like hell. But Shuri knew better.

Parker could rip this thing off its hinges in an instant. He was playing normals for his little coworkers out there.

How _exhausting_.

“SHURI. Goddamnit. Ave. Let me use your phone.”

“My--?”

“Your _phone_ , girl. Your _phone_. Now.”

A commotion started up outside as the squeak of a number of sneakers started to join in with the voices. More voices started echoing.

“MOVE,” Parker ordered the crowd outside.

Shuri heard him tear open the door to office adjacent. She heard muffled scraping and swearing as he bumped into things and dragged the company phone closer to him so that he could dial his own extension.

It was beautiful.

The phone beside her rang malevolently.

She decided not to answer it.

“SHURI,” Parker roared through the wall as the crowd out in front of his door got louder and more excited. Its volume pulsed with his shouts, as though all the bodies out there flinched back from his tone.

Shuri hopped an ass cheek up onto Parker’s desk and got a face cheek pressed up against the wall, mere inches away from where she knew Parker was getting ready to sink a fist.

“Yes, dear?” she asked.

“What the FUCK are you doing here?” Parker snarled.

“I dunno, why the _fuck_ are you getting so upset?” she asked.

A sound of frustration answered her.

“I missed you,” she told the wall, grinning so hard her cheeks ached.

“So you’re terrorizing my staff?” Parker snapped.

“I _missed_ you,” Shuri drawled. “You stopped answering my texts. I’m mad about it.”

Parker groaned audibly and the spillover staff that had followed him into that office muttered among themselves.

“I got a new number,” Parker gritted out.

“Avoiding me?” Shuri asked.

“Princess,” Parker groaned. “I wasn’t ignoring you. For fuck’s sake, just open the door already.”

“Mmm. No. I want an apology first,” Shuri decided, surveying her nail polish for cracks.

“SHURI.”

“That doesn’t sound like an apology,” she said idly.

“Oh. My. GOD.”

“Just ‘princess’ still, boo,” she said.

“OH MY GOD.”

See this?

This was why she loved Parker. Sweet Peter Parker. He bent and bent and kept on bending. It would take eons for him to break.

Even if her mind was galaxies and his cave-shadows, he could still keep up with her in games of wit and snark. They had similar attention spans. Similar veins of humor.

Parker found this whole thing hilarious. Really, he did. If all these people weren’t here, he’d be crying with laughter--helpless with it—trying weakly to open the door. Trying to plead with her through the wall to open it through the tears. Reveling in the pettiness with her.

It was objectively _hilarious_.

“Shu _ri_. Please,” Parker begged by her ear. “This is my place of work. I work here. These are my coworkers. Don’t do this.”

“I don’t know,” Shuri sang. “Maybe, if I had an apology, I would be more inclined to leave them and you be.”

Parker groaned. His staff and coworkers chattered. Asking each other how Parker, of all people, knew the princess of Wakanda. How?? Was he a sleeper agent? Some kind of international spy? Maybe they’d met on a train? Did princesses take the train?

Had they both met undercover while trying to destroy each others’ labs???

Shuri liked the way these people thought.

“Okay, okay. I’m sorry,” Parker said through the wall. “I’m sorry for not texting you back. My phone broke from—well. You know how it broke—and I switched to a new carrier and I forgot to message you to let you know. And for that, I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.”

“You will,” Shuri said, still inspecting her nails.

“I mean. Yeah. Obviously. Have you met me?”

That was more like it.

“Are you happy now?” Parker asked through the wall.

“Mm. Getting there,” Shuri said. “I require a sacrifice.”

“For the love of—fine. What do you want?”

“Sandwich from Joe’s. Jewish accompaniment.”

“I get off work in an hour.”

“Is that a promise or a statement, Benjamin?” Shuri asked her nails.

She could hear Parker trying not to cackle on the other side. She could hear him trying to save face.

“A promise, princess,” he managed to say seriously.

She opened the door.

The crowd of white coats gathered around it flew back from her in shock. All except Parker himself. He dropped a hand onto his hip.

“You’re _sooooo_ much fun,” he said.

She smiled at him. Then held out her palm.

“Phone,” she said.

He rolled his eyes and fished it out of his pocket. He put it in her hand.

“I _love_ when you submit to me,” she told him kindly.

“I love when you make me submit,” Parker told her with a tiny touch of a dark edge.

“WOAH. Huh-uh. Hold everything,” a woman wearing a white headscarf interrupted. “Peter, explain before I cry right here, right now. Of panic and confusion. Don’t try me. I can do it on command, I am full of so much existential dread.”

Parker grimaced and apparently decided he couldn’t put the inevitable off any longer. He turned back to his coworkers and sighed.

“What do you want me to say?” he asked them. “This is Shuri; Shuri, princess of Wakanda, meet everyone. Everyone, this is the royal Hubris Humbler of Africa.”

The woman in the lavender scarf—Ms. Saanvi, Shuri now knew—recoiled.

“How did you get in here?” she asked Shuri.

Shuri cocked a hip.

“Through the door,” she said. “Like anyone else.”

This really brought the tone down among the group.

“Just? Through the door?” Ms. Saanvi repeated.

“Yeah,” Shuri said.

“You just--? Down the hallway? And no one—no one saw you?” Ms. Saanvi repeated.

“Guess not,” Shuri said.

“But _why_?” The woman with the white scarf asked.

“Why?” Shuri repeated. “Because Parker didn’t answer my texts. He could have been dead. He could have died. What kind of friend would I be to leave him like that?”

“She doesn’t like to be ignored,” Parker translated.

He was very good at translating. Shuri smiled at him indulgently.

“Wait,” the man with the deep voice said. He was dark-skinned with a square jaw and clear lab goggles perched on top of his head. “You two are, what? Buddies? Friends? Peter, you just _happen_ to be friends with Wakanda royalty?”

Parker shrugged a shoulder.

“Mr. Stark introduced us when I was an intern,” he said. “Told me to occupy her while he had meetings with the King. So we used to trawl the city. It wasn’t a big thing.”

It really wasn’t.

All this staring was completely unnecessary.

“Sorry, sorry. This was when you were…?” the man asked.

“Oof. Fifteen? Sixteen? How old were we?” Parker asked Shuri.

“Barely sixteen, I think,” she said.

Parker gestured to her for his coworkers’ benefit.

“Oh,” the woman in the white scarf said. “I guess that makes sense.”

It did indeed.

“I heard something about lobster eggs,” Shuri reported to Parker.

The woman in the white scarf bolted up straight as though her internal fire had been re-ignited.

“I have royal authority before me,” she said. “Princess. Do you—can you—these people have never seen lobster roe. Tell them, if you’ll be so kind, that this shi—stuff. That this _stuff_ looks just like it.”

Parker’s nose twitched at that.

He immediately turned eyes over to someone standing at the very end of that hallway. Shuri followed them to two women tucked together over there, staring fiercely right back at Parker.

“Bring me the _stuff_ ,” Parker said like a threat in their direction.

It looked _exactly_ like lobster roe.

“Fucking BITE ME, LEO,” the woman with the white scarf roared at the man with the goggles. He shoved hands into his face to rub at his eyes.

“BITE ME.”

“Himani,” Ms. Saanvi said with soothing hands. “You’re working yourself up.”

Shuri wondered if those two just spent all day taking turns patting at each other and saying ‘it’s going to be okay.’

She kind of loved that.

She also loved how Parker was looming over those two women from before, with the bucket of lobster roe held ominously in his hands.

The ladies cringed back but didn’t move their feet.

Shuri had a meme for this.

“A member of the Wakandan royal family is in our midst and this is how you disgrace this facility,” Parker said softly.

One of the ladies decided to chance reaching out and giving the bucket in his hands a little tug.

“ _This_ is what you think of me?” Parker said.

“Not gonna eat it,” the tugging woman said.

“Why do you do this to me, Lovett?” Parker whispered. “Who hurt you?”

“We’re not gonna eat it,” Lovett repeated.

“I’m burning it,” Parker said solemnly. “And I’m putting you on sanitization for the next week. Girl, why do you make me do this? We both know you’re bad at it.”

Lovett smiled a little.

“I hate that,” Parker told her passionately. “I hate when you do that. Stop doing this. Please. I’m begging you. I can’t take any more.”

“Can we have the ashes?” the woman behind Lovett popped out to ask.

It was the last straw for Parker, apparently.

T’Challa was displeased.

He’d called Shuri’s phone five times. She’d ignored each and every one.

“So you have a behavior chart,” she said to Parker as they snacked through a cardboard bowl of French fries outside a fast-food joint in Kips Bay.

“It’s the only thing between me and chaos,” Parker said.

His whole staff had pleaded with him on behalf of their coworkers not to change Lovett and her friend Wallace’s chart colors from yellow to red.

Shuri asked him what he’d promised them all if they got to the end of the month with no red marks on the chart and he said that such a thing had happened only once in his team at Stark Industries. Because of that, the chart tended to be more of a weekly application and what his staff got if they made it through the week without any red squares was a gentle squeeze on the shoulder and a ‘good work’ from him before they all left on Friday.

“And that…works?” Shuri asked.

“You have no idea what our school system is like,” Parker said.

No. Apparently she did not.

Her lab would descend into paranoia if she tried to pull that shit. Her team all stood in line with their weekly results at the end of it and then thanked her after she tore them to shreds.

“Do you need to get that?” Parker asked, gesturing to her again-vibrating phone on the table.

She considered it as it rattled a couple inches towards the table’s center.

“No,” she said. “I think I’m still being unnecessarily stubborn. Anyways, I heard you found a rat king.”

“Oh my god,” Parker said reaching out and taking her hand with both of his. “He’s _beautiful_ , Shuri.”

“Take me to my fellow royalty.”

“Anything for you, your highness.”

Brothers could wait. Shuri had skies to blend.


End file.
